Do we really need more channels than we can actually watch?

I think the time is right to give television a bit of a kicking, in fact I believe an onslaught of abuse is long overdue. Being rude wont change anything of course - Tony Blair's still in office and I've been swearing at him for years - so I'll restrict my words to those acceptable to the Oxford English dictionary. (At this point I'd like to thank The Sex Pistols for championing the word bollocks because I intend to use it at least twice in this essay; if that offends you, switch off now.)

Television: When did the Rot set in?

The Rot began to set in during 1989, the year Sky television launched its UK service via the Astra Satellite; although neutral in colour and with no discernable shape, by 1989 the Rot was already beginning to smell funny. By 1990 both Sky Television and British Satellite Broadcasting were beginning to struggle with the burden of massive losses. The collapse of BSB in November 1990 led to a merger, which was in effect a takeover by Sky; it quickly became obvious that quality programming had been no match for Rupert Murdoch's aggressive marketing skills and pragmatic capital expenditure; it was 1990 and the King of the Sun was on his horse and riding into town. One year later (I think it was on a Sunday) scientists discovered that the Rot had morphed into a living organism and was actually ready to breed, but it didn't deter the million happy viewers from subscribing to Murdoch's dream. The new company was called British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) but marketed as Sky. BSB's channels were largely scrapped in favour of Sky's and BSB’s Marco Polo satellites were run down and eventually sold in favour of the Astra system. The merger probably saved Sky’s financial problems because in the beginning they had very few major advertisers. Acquiring BSB's healthier advertising contracts and equipment appeared to solve the company's problems.

In the beginning everything was fresh and new and sparkly and easy to negotiate because there were only a few extra channels for the million happy subscribers to adapt to. Video tape recorders were still popular at the time so there was no need to miss a single episode of Coronation Street or Eastenders when you wanted to watch super-mullet VJ Pat Sharp present Sky One's UK Top 40. All appeared to be well, but all along, hidden from the million happy subscribers in a cocoon attached to the underside of their shiny new satellite converters, the Rot was busy teaching itself how to copulate and multiply almost as quickly as Sky itself. The Rot knew time was on its side and slipped into a comfortable hibernation, secure in the knowledge that one day it would be here to stay.

After a few years Sky’s stranglehold on its new audience began to wane and the King of the Sun began to loose sleep over his falling audience figures; but, being a shrewd and canny creature, the King soon found his ace in the shape of a loveable family of dysfunctional yellow Americans called The Simpsons. The King had discovered his pot of gold, and from that day forward the pot of gold would be called CABLE TV. It was indeed a plentiful and cavernous pot and from its depths did he find such gems as Friends and ER with which to snare his sleeping audience. But it wasn’t only his audience that had been sleeping. The Rot, oblivious to the growing trend of multi channel TV, awoke from hibernation and began to populate other parts of the house. Wherever a portable TV set found a home, so too did the Rot; and with all of the extra sets and all of the extra channels, the truth about the Rot and its multiplying tentacles would soon come out. And so it came to pass that by 2006 the million happy subscribers had multiplied into a single massive entity, a monster unlike anything anyone had ever seen before (except on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The monster, known to the King of the Sun by its pet name of Affluence should have been extremely intelligent because it actually had 8,176,000 brains (coincidentally the number of subscribers to the King of the Sun's TV network) but because of the multitude of TV channels at its disposal Affluence was unable to make up its own mind about anything, especially when armed with a remote control.

If you’re thinking now that I have a big problem with Sky TV you’d be close, but you wouldn’t be winning any cigars. Murdoch deserves his empire because he’s tapped into the consciousness of his audience in a way that Presidents, Dictators and Prime Ministers can only dream about. He is a media genius, a true mogul and the undisputed King of the Sun, The Times and the News of the World. And it doesn’t stop there. He owns the New York Post, the Fox News Channel and has a 34 percent stake in Hughes Electronics; and on July 20, 2005, his company News Corporation bought Intermix Media Inc., which held MySpace.com. And these are just a handful of his acquisitions. He’s also the bastard who put the British print unions out of business. But that’s another story. No, I do not have a big problem with Sky TV, it’s the competition of multi-channeled TV and its effect on the terrestrial channels that has me reaching for my Semtex and Kalashnikov.

Once upon a time terrestrial TV was the champion of home grown drama, and in some ways it still is. Sky will never be able to compete with programs like Shameless and Inspector Morse, nor will it replace the comic genius of The Fast Show, The League of Gentlemen or Green Wing because the contents of Murdoch’s pot of gold are invariably American. Don’t switch off just yet, I promise not to bash the American’s – plenty of people are already doing that these days thank you – it’s the formula I have a problem with, the super shiny formula they slather over every program coming out of the land of the free. I believe they call it HIGH PRODUCTION VALUES or something like that in Hollywood TV land, but in plain speak it’s just bollocks. How can you take a horror show seriously when the monster is better looking than Brad Pitt?

ITV and the BBC used to spend a lot of cash on drama and documentary, they still do – but not as often. These days they are too busy learning how to compete with the King of the Sun to worry about spending money and resources on a new series of Cracker. Up and down the country, deep inside the air conditioned offices of TV Land, smartly dressed executives are wiping the jam off of their designer shirts and asking themselves the same question: “Why bother with big production drama when it’s far cheaper and a whole lot easier to follow the trend set by Big Brother?”  With shows like Hells Kitchen, The X Factor, Fantasy Love Island, Changing Rooms, The Apprentice, Supernanny and Pop Idol - to name but a handful of the bollocks they pass off as entertainment - there really is no need whatsoever to overstretch the company budget on another drama series. The smartly dressed executives love this because every penny saved on quality entertainment can be spent on cocaine and blow jobs from high class hookers.

Reality TV comes with more baggage than Paris Hilton on a shopping spree in New York. It’s nice baggage of course, expensive and very very glossy baggage, but it’s not the kind of baggage you’d pack your trunks into before flying off to Spain for your holidays. In ENTERTAINMENT terms Reality TV baggage is known as…the COMMERCIAL BREAK, a spectacle to be repeated more frequently, and a lot LOUDER than an episode of Friends.

The Rot stirs. It opens its gummed-up eyes and moves its weight from one side to the other. A cold cup of tea stands on the arm of its chair but it’s too lethargic to reach for it; instead it leans slightly to one side and picks up the remote control dropped by Affluence when Affluence passed out during a re-run of Only Fools and Horses on UK-GOLD. The Rot presses a button on the remote control and looks on as a commercial for soap powder becomes a commercial for cat food. Frowning (for it now has eyebrows and a forehead) it presses the button again and watches as the cat food transforms into a brand new Chevrolet 4 wheel drive. For a moment it believes it’s watching a re-run of Baywatch and its eyebrows arch upward in anticipation of Pamela Anderson’s bouncing bosom, but the Chevrolet’s gone now, replaced by a man in an elephant suit selling insurance. Disheartened the Rot drops the remote control and closes its eyes again. It is asleep in seconds.

The commercial break is the hyperactive lovechild of multi-channel TV, the child that used to play for three minutes every quarter of an hour but now plays for five minutes in every fifteen. ADHD has claimed the child of multi-channel TV and transformed it into the single most formidable force for capitalism on the planet. We all know how much commercials suck and we all try to avoid them in one way or another (I usually press the mute button) so why are they there? Multi-channel TV spares no expense when it comes to commercials, in fact some of the ads cost more to make than the programs they interrupt. Why is this? When was the last time a TV commercial inspired you to get up and go shopping? And why do they advertise the price of a new car at “only nine-nine-nine-five” when we all know they mean TEN THOUSAND POUNDS? Commercials ruin everything they touch, breaking up narrative and spoiling the flow of a story at the worst possible time. They’re shoe-horned into films with no thought about continuity and they are always LOUDER than the programs they disrupt. Commercials suck the big one…oh yes they do. Of course there is a bright side; you can make a lot of cups of tea during the five minute break dissecting the latest episode of Lost. You probably wont remember what happened before you put the kettle on, and you’ll find you’re more lost than Lost itself by the time the tea’s ready, but at least you’ll have something hot to dunk your biscuits into which is more than Hurley can say. The children of today will never know the experience of watching a program that doesn’t contain a message from a sponsor and only has two commercial breaks, and for that I pity them. Their viewing experience has been ruined forever.

By now, of course, the Rot has set right in; and here’s why. BSkyB has a turnover of £4.148 billion. The company set up by Rupert Murdoch made a profit of £798 million before tax and £551 million after tax. As of 30 June 2006 it had 8,176,000 direct to home customers in the UK and Ireland. Quantity is far more important than quality for the King of the Sun which is why there is so much junk forced down our throats between 5 and 10pm – the fabled five hour slot known to all as PRIME TIME; five hours of soap, news, food, style, celebrity, reality and documentary (but nothing too heavy please, it's early). And how do they cram so much stuff into such a short space of time? Repeats of course. “Don’t worry,” they cry. “If you missed it today it’ll be on again tomorrow.” The good stuff, the dare I say intelligent stuff, lays in a room somewhere in the bowels of TV Land in a box that some wise guy with a marker pen has labeled HIGH BROW. You can’t miss the box, it’s the bright green one with all of the foreign language films, important documentaries, movies without car chases or explosions and re-runs of Ren & Stimpy inside - broadsheet programs if that’s what you want to call the blasted things. They’re all there, waiting patiently for the witching hour to arrive because they’re not due to start until after eleven, in fact some of the best movies shown on TV don’t start until three o-clock in the morning. Who watches this stuff? Is it the unemployed, the workers of unsociable hours, the insomniacs and the psycho’s – anybody? It certainly aint me, I have to go to work in the morning along with millions of others. Perhaps I should go on the sick so I can watch all of this stuff before the Rot takes over completely and forces me to burn my TV. Or should I just burn the damn thing anyway?

The government plans to switch off analogue TV signals, region-by-region, by 2012. No doubt the commercials will have program breaks and the BBC will be pay-per-view by then. The Rot will have won the battle and I will be reading a book.

I’d like to acknowledge Wikipedia for the facts and figures regarding Sky TV.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_TV
Thanks